On 10/15/06, Oskar Sigvardsson oskarsigvardsson@gmail.com wrote:
On 10/5/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
In general, I find the {{fact}} tagging to be overdone in Wikipedia. A better option is to nuke the unsourced material. Sometimes {{fact}} is warranted, I don't mean that it is always a bad idea. But it is overdone.
I very often see completely preposterous claims tagged with {{fact}}, usually because an editor is being excessively cautious. Be bold. :)
--Jimbo
I agree, but in this case summarily removing all of the unsourced statements will result in a revert, or a revert war. If you place {{fact}} on all of the statements instead, it is much easier to delete them a week from now.
Yes, until there is a rule that unsourced statements may be removed immediately (which I would favor), using the {{fact}} tag for a week or so seems to be the best solution for statements which a) are fairly harmless if false, and b) might very well be true.
Now what would be nice is to have a way to keep track of this sort of thing so that within a week or so something is done to address the situation. But short of having someone code something up (someone was working on a mediawiki "tasks" feature which would probably work perfectly for this sort of thing), I'm afraid this would lead to too much instruction creep.
Anthony